THIS DATE, FROM HENRY DAVID THOREAU'S JOURNAL

April 18, 1859

I am looking for acorns these days, to sow on the Walden lot, but can find very few sound ones. Those which the squirrels have not got are mostly worm-eaten and quite pulverized or decayed. A few which are cracked at the small [end], having started last fall, have yet life in them, perhaps enough to plant. Even these look rather discolored when you cut them open, but Buttrick says they will do for pigeon-bait. So each man looks at things from his own point of view. I found by trial that the last or apparently sound acorns would always sink in water, while the rotten ones would float, and I have accordingly offered five cents a quart for such as will sink. You can thus separate the good from the bad in a moment. I am not sure, however, but the germs of many of the latter have been injured by the frost.

April 16, 1859

Sheldrakes yet on Walden, but I have not identified a whistler for several weeks, - three or more.

April 15, 1859

Consider how much is annually spent on the farmer’s life: the beauty of his abode, which has inspired poets since the world was made; the hundreds of delicate and beautiful flowers scattered profusely under his feet and all around him, as he walks or drives his team afield, - he cannot put his spade into uncultivated, nor into much cultivated, ground without disturbing some of them; a hundred or two of equally beautiful birds to sing to him morning and evening, and some at noonday, a good part of the year; a perfect sky arched over him, a perfect carpet spread under him, etc., etc.! And can the farmer speak or think carelessly of these gifts? Will he find it in his heart to curse the flowers and shoot the birds?

April 12, 1859

Some meadows are now saved by the causeways and bridges and willow-rows. Though there were a hundred pieces in Potter Swamp Meadow, there were none in the meadow this side the causeway. Probably more meadow, etc., was transported two hundred years ago than to-day there, when the river, at high water especially, was less obstructed. This is the origin of almost all inequalities of surface in the meadows, and it is impossible to say how many of the clumps of bushes you see there have been thus transplanted.

Consider what a new arrangement of the clumps in the mead is thus made every year. The revolution from each source is now confined to the space between two causeways and bridges, or two willow-rows, while formerly it was only confined by the form or dimensions of the meadow.

April 8, 1854

P. M. - To Lee’s Cliff via Clamshell.

Methinks I do not see such great and lively flocks of hyemalis and tree sparrows in the morning since the warm days, the 4th, 5th, and 6th. Perchance after the warmer days, which bring out the frogs and butterflies, the alders and maples, the greater part of them leave for the north and give place to newcomers.

At the Lyceum the other night I felt that the lecturer had chosen a theme too foreign to himself and so failed to interest me as much as formerly. He described things not in or near to his heart, but toward his extremities and superficies. The poet deals with his privatest experience. There was no central nor centralizing thought in the lecture.

April 7, 1860

The purple finch, - if not before.

P. M. - To Annursnack.

This is the Rana halecina day, - awakening of the meadows, - though not very warm. The thermometer in Boston to-day is said to be 49. Probably, then, when it is about 50 at this season, the river being low, they are to be heard in calm places.

Fishes now lie up abundantly in shallow water in the sun, - pickerel, and I see several bream. What was lately motionless and lifeless ice is a transparent liquid in which the stately pickerel moves along. A novel sight is that of the first bream that has come forth from I know not what hibernaculum, moving gently over the still brown river-bottom, where scarcely a weed has started. Water is as yet only melted ice, or like that of November, which is ready to become ice.

As we were ascending the hill in the road beyond College Meadow, we saw the dust, etc., in the middle of the road at the top of the hill taken up by a small whirlwind. Pretty soon it began to move northeasterly through the balm-of-Gilead grove, taking up a large body of withered leaves beneath it, which were whirled about with a great rustling and carried forward with it into the meadow, frightening some hens there. And so they went on, gradually, or rather one after another, settling to the ground, and looking at last almost exactly like a flock of small birds dashing about in sport, till they were out of sight forty or fifty rods off. These leaves were chiefly only a rod above the ground (I noticed some taken up last spring very high into the air), and the diameter of the whirl may have been a rod, more or less.

Early potentilla out, - how long? - on side of Annursnack. 

 

April 6, 1860

Rainy, more or less, - April weather.

I am struck by the fact that at this season all vegetable growth is confined to the warm days; during the cold ones it is stationary, or even killed. Vegetation thus comes forward rather by fits and starts than by a steady progress. Some flowers would blossom tomorrow if it were as warm as to-day, but cold weather intervening may detain them a week or more. The spring thus advances and recedes repeatedly, - its pendulum oscillates, - while it is carried steadily forward. Animal life is to its extent subject to a similar law. It is in warm and calm days that most birds arrive and reptiles and insects and men come forth.

A toad has been seen dead on the sidewalk, flattened. 

April 2, 1856

Here, where I come for the earliest flowers, I might also come for the earliest birds. They seek the same warmth and vegetation. And so probably with quadrupeds, - rabbits, skunks, mice, etc. I hear now, as I stand over the first skunk-cabbage, the notes of the first red-wings, like the squeaking of a sign, over amid the maples yonder. Robins are peeping and flitting about. Am surprised to hear one sing regularly their morning strain, seven or eight rods off, yet so low and smothered with its ventriloquism that you would say it was half a mile off. It seems to be wooing its mate, that sits within a foot of it.